Bess Truman (43 page)

In his letters to Mother while on this vacation, Dad concentrated on domestic matters. She was well-briefed on the international situation, thanks to her nightly conferences with the number one expert on it, the President of the United States. In this letter, he discussed his struggle to reach the American people to counter the misrepresentation of his efforts for peace by left-wing Democrats and right-wing Republicans.

Dad returned from Key West to give another historic speech before Congress, calling for a renewal of the draft and swift passage of the money for the Marshall Plan. He urged Congress to support the treaty of alliance recently signed by the nations of Western Europe - the first step to NATO - and condemned the Soviet Union for having “destroyed the independence and democratic character of a whole series of nations in Eastern and Central Europe.” He bluntly accused them of planning to export the same brand of tyranny to the rest of Europe.

It seems strange, now, with our old friend hindsight smiling beside us, that Americans could not recognize Harry Truman as the man who was rallying the free world at a crucial turning point in history. But the people who were supposed to care most about that sort of thing, the Democratic Party’s liberals, the supposed heirs of that destroyer of isolationism, Franklin D. Roosevelt, were a lot more worried about losing the election to the Republicans. Personifying this desertion of the president were FDR’s sons, Elliott and Franklin, who issued statements urging the Democrats to draft General Eisenhower.

For Mother, those first six months of 1948 were not all politics. I had sort of returned to the fold and was having severe doubts about my singing career. My first concert tour had been a financial success, but I had begun to question the kind of coaching I was getting and the direction in which I was being steered by my advisers. While I mulled, Mother (with Dad’s collaboration) lured me back into the presidential orbit. Mother tempted me with invitations that few twenty-four-year-olds could resist, such as a chance to go to the Mardi Gras in New Orleans and, incidentally, to christen a Mississippi River tugboat named after Dad.

We traveled to the Queen City of the South by train. I marveled at the way Mother was so agreeable about getting off at every city on our route to greet reporters and photographers and delegations of women who filled our arms with flowers. Atlanta, Montgomery, Mobile, Biloxi, we smiled through them all. It only dawned on me as we got to New Orleans that my supposedly nonpolitical Mother was
campaigning.
And Harry Truman had not yet even announced he was going to run for a second term.

That announcement came a few months later, in a speech Dad made to the Young Democrats Dinner at the Mayflower Hotel. With Mother and me sitting in the audience, Dad condemned the liberal “calamity howlers” who were wailing that Truman could not win. “I want to say to you that for the next four years there will be a Democrat in the White House and you are looking at him.”

Mother was pessimistic about his chances. Not once throughout the spring or summer of 1948, or even in the fall when the campaign was picking up steam, did I hear her express any confidence in Harry Truman’s reelection. When I or anyone else among the tiny band of true believers told Dad he was going to win in spite of the polls or the newspapers or the empty campaign chest, Mother remained silent.

India Edwards, the Democratic National Committeewoman, had breakfast with Dad and Mother in the fall. India had remained staunchly behind the Truman candidacy, ignoring the panicky liberals. “India,” Dad said in his teasing way, “sometimes I think there are only two people in the whole United States who really believe I am going to be elected. But the Boss here is not one of them.”

That negative opinion did not stop Bess from rooting fiercely for the candidate - and working long hours on his behalf. That spring of 1948 was the most exhausting time Bess spent in the White House. A glance at her schedule would daunt an Olympic decathlon winner. Take April 13, for instance. That day four separate groups of women came to the White House, and Bess literally shook hands from morning until night.

Early in May, one of the White House women reporters noted Bess’ pace. “After shaking hands with 1,800 guests Tuesday afternoon, Mrs. Truman began another two weeks of luncheons, teas, receptions,” she wrote. There was the picnic for the Senate Ladies’ Luncheon Club and a reception for the members of the American Law Institute and a garden party for veterans in Washington hospitals and a luncheon given by the B’nai B’rith and a reception for the National League of American Pen Women. The topper was a reception on May 4 for 3,000 government women.

On May 12, Mother walked into my bedroom with an almost berserk smile on her face. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “Tomorrow there’s absolutely nothing on my calendar. Let’s celebrate.”

We went to lunch with Mrs. Davis, our neighbor at 4701 Connecticut Avenue in 1945. We talked and talked but not about politics. “Now what would you like to do?” I asked.

“Go for a ride in the convertible,” Bess said. The Secret Service men were aghast at the idea of the First Lady and First Daughter in an open car, as Mother knew they would be. But they learned to keep their alarums to themselves most of the time. So we cruised around Washington in the May sunshine, with three or four agents gnawing their fingernails in a car behind us. “Go slow so I can window-shop,” Mother said. The driver obeyed, and we had a wonderful time.

While Bess toiled on the social front, President Truman was not exactly idle on the political front. In Germany, the Russians were becoming nastier about permitting the western Allies access to the city of Berlin. A blockade was in the making and with it the threat of war.

In Washington, the Eightieth Congress was heading for adjournment, having contemptuously refused to pass a single piece of legislation Harry Truman had submitted to them. The liberals were still trying to draft Eisenhower, and Henry Wallace had announced that he was going to run for president as the candidate of the Progressive Party. The southern Democrats were in virtual revolt because the president had ordered the end of racial segregation in the armed forces.

What to do? There was only one alternative, as Harry Truman saw it. He had to take his case to the people. He decided to do it before the Democratic National Convention, to silence the calamity howlers by showing them there was broad popular support for his record as president. He told Bess that he wanted her and me to come with him on a “nonpartisan” trip across the country to inspect such government properties as the Grand Coulee Dam and to deliver a commencement address at the University of California.

There was not a word of protest from Bess, in spite of the fact that Grandmother Wallace was seriously ill. Her heart was beginning to fail, and that caused severe swelling in her legs, which forced her to stay in bed. In other years, such an illness would have prompted Bess to cancel every social and political obligation in sight. Instead, she took Grandmother home to Independence and persuaded me to join them there. A week later, on June 6, 1948, Mother and I boarded the seventeen-car presidential train in Omaha.

By that time, Dad had made a few stops in Ohio and Indiana, where his remarks about the Eightieth Congress and their betrayal of the farmer and the workingman were not exactly nonpartisan. In Omaha, it was more of the same, and he laid it on with ever more scorching language as we rolled through Wyoming and Idaho and Montana into Washington. There, Dad’s old Senate friend, Governor Mon Wallgren, made a crucial contribution to the Truman campaign style. He began introducing Mother and me at every stop. People seemed to like it, even though we did nothing but smile and wave.

Next, Senator Robert Taft, the dour leader of the Senate Republicans, made another contribution to Trumanology. In a speech in Philadelphia, he accused Harry Truman of “blackguarding Congress at every whistle station in the West.”

J. Howard McGrath, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, promptly telegraphed the mayors of thirty-five cities and towns that we had visited, asking them how they liked being called whistle-stops. Dad, with the same instinct that prompted the Americans of 1776 to make that condescending British tune “Yankee Doodle” into a song of defiance, began talking about his whistle-stop campaign.

In Seattle and Los Angeles, which are somewhat above whistle-stop status, we Truman loyalists got a look at the depth of the president’s support. The sidewalks were jammed with cheering people as we rode through these cities. The Los Angeles crowd was well over a million. Dad gave rousing speeches in both places. That warm-up tour, which many people have forgotten, convinced most of the White House staff that Harry Truman could win in November, no matter what the polls said.

The success of this first campaign trip is reflected in the sunny letter Dad wrote Mother on their twenty-ninth wedding anniversary.

Touched as she undoubtedly was by this letter, Mother remained a doubter about Dad’s chances for reelection. This opinion did not imply any criticism of his performance as president. It was just her pessimism at work. She kept her opinion to herself and worked her head off to help him win.

The same do or die spirit was not shared by large sections of the Democratic Party. Both parties had chosen Philadelphia for their nominating conventions. The Republicans were meeting first. So dispirited was the Democratic National Committee, they humbly asked the GOP if they would leave up their flags and bunting so the Democrats could save the cost of putting up fresh decorations. Apparently they were hoarding their cash for the 1952 campaign.

The Republicans convened in Philadelphia on June 21, 1948, and they could not have been more arrogant. They nominated Thomas E. Dewey for president and Earl Warren for vice president and talked as if they were already in the White House. Clare Booth Luce said President Truman was “a gone goose,” and threw in a comment on Bess that drove Dad up the wall. She called her an “ersatz First Lady.”

In the White House, we were momentarily distracted from these political slings and arrows by an awful personal tragedy. One of my frequent escorts during the first three White House years had been a tall, handsome ex-naval officer named Bobby Stewart. I was half in love with him, and so was my friend Drucie Snyder, Secretary of the Treasury Snyder’s daughter. Bobby dated her as often as he dated me. We had met Bobby and his parents, Louise and Earl Stewart, through the Snyders.

As brilliant as he was good-looking, Bobby had been raised in Paris and spoke fluent French and a half dozen other languages. His father was an international businessman; his mother was a tiny, red-haired woman from Indiana with a fey sense of humor. Bobby was her only son and the center of her universe. On June 17, Bobby was flying from Denver to New York for Louise’s birthday. The airliner hit a transformer outside the Pittsburgh airport and crashed, killing everyone on board.

Drucie and I were devastated. Mother was almost as upset. To use an old-fashioned phrase, her heart went out to Louise Stewart. With everything Dad had on his mind, she prevailed on him to join us for the funeral ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery. It was one of the hottest days in the history of Washington, D.C. We sat in the little chapel and listened to Louise sob. There was nothing left of Bobby but his arm, which was in a small coffin on the altar.

Ten days later, on June 27, 1948, Dad sent the bereaved parents a long letter. “I was very fond of Bobby,” he wrote. “I think he had a great future. It is my hope that you will make Bobby’s spirit realize that future. I believe you can do it.” He suggested that each year they pick out a boy and a girl in Anderson, Indiana, Louise’s hometown, and Columbia, Missouri, Earl Stewart’s hometown, and give them enough money to get them through high school. “In a four year course you would be supporting sixteen young men and young women for a fundamental education - much more important to the young people than college. You would only take those who could not afford the cost of going to high school. . . . You’d make Bobby immortal! You’d have the greatest life interest in the world looking after these young people - and I’m sure God Almighty would be pleased.”

This is from a man who was only ten days away from going to Philadelphia to confront a hostile, divided Democratic Convention. He was struggling to hold the party together, raise money for the campaign, and to keep the Russians out of Berlin. Although Harry Truman wrote this letter, I am absolutely certain that its real author was Bess. Throughout these politically frantic weeks, she sent flowers, wrote letters, and paid visits to Louise Stewart, trying to help her deal with her grief.